My name is Matthew and this is my blog. It's a personal blog and isn't affiliated with any of the companies I work for or have worked for in the past. Just to get that out of the way.

Thursday, June 16, 2005

I got time to kill, sly looks in corridors without a plan of yours

The bandages are off and the thumb is still there. The votes are in, the polls are closed and the results are being calculated. More on that story later.

On the way home tonight, I saw a police car with it’s lights on and it’s door sitting open. It reminded me of an incident when I was a lot younger. We used to live in houses that backed on to a waste-ground. The land had been bought but was not developed for about ten years. We used to call it “the site,” (as in “the building site” only it never was as long as we played on it). It was a great natural playground, I remember spending a happy couple of weeks flattening nettles with a thick plank of wood, but that isn’t the point here. A few weeks before, someone (I think it was me) had lost the key for the garage door and we had to replace the locks on the back door to the garage. For some reason this meant actually removing the door and we’d propped the old one up against the fence once the new door (complete with new lock) had been installed.

Someone broke out of prison, they had stolen a car and drive quite a distance with police tailing them. A helicopter was also scrambled and followed the scene. Unlike these days, they didn’t have cameras in them so we couldn’t view the whole thing later. For some reason the escaped convict decided to turn off the main road near our house. We lived in a court – once you drive in the only way out was back out the way you came – so the convict fled the car, through our back garden and hopped it over our old garage door into the waste ground. The police car stopped and a policeman followed, or tried to; hoping the garage door (which had been outdoors sometime) caused the poor door to give way, and it broke under the policeman. I still remember the hole where his foot had gone through. I remember watching from the window of my bedroom; the amber street lights with the insistent blue flashing of the lights on the police car, the clatter of the helicopter over the wasteground.

Of course the police car I saw on the way home was part of nothing so dramatic. Probably. A car was parked in front and the door was open to let air in to whoever was sitting in the back of the police car.

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I remember that! I remember waking up with you lot kneeling on my bed, as I had managed to sleep through the whole thing. However, I never understood why the garage door was there in the first place. So that answers a question I never really thought about.

Well the talking fingers "joke" is about writing stuff. Presumebly I could still generate blog entries if I were to successfully remove my fingers using voice recognition, but it wouldn't be my fingers talking.

That'll be where the tree in the woods comes in. My argument for that one was always that sound is vibrations in the air translated by the auditory canal and the brain, so without a person there with an auditory canal and a brain then it doesn't make sound just a vibration in the air.

Sorry, my last comment made no sense. I spelt presumably incorrectly, and implied that you could remove digits using voice recognition (when I meant that I could use voice recognition software if I didn't have the ability to use my fingers).

I'm hoping someone made sense of it.

It's all a fine excuse to use a pun I'd been saving about letting your fingers do the talking but I can't bring myself to do so now.

I think the Man With No Name was suggesting that we're a bit sad for getting into a philosophical discussion about the finer points of whether stumps of ex-finger can talk. Hence, the ghetto we need to get out of is an entirely rhetorical one.